Yamagata Rough Cut!
• October 9–10 [Venue] Q1 Yamagata Creative City Center Q1 (2F) 2-B
A “rough cut” is a loosely edited, incomplete version of a film or short video screened before its final edit. The purpose of Yamagata Rough Cut! is to create a space where film festival participants from all over the world can come together to watch, hear, experience, and discuss “rough cut” short films. The program attempts to create a space where a dialogue transcending standpoints, genres, and borders about “raw” film footage is possible. We bring together people from all walks of the industry—producers, audiences, critics, and researchers—to meet and interact across roles, considering together a collection of the world’s unruly, unpolished visual fragments and cutting up our notion of “film” as a finished whole.
- Comradeship
- Director: Mauk Kham Wah (MYANMAR)
Comradeship is a documentary focusing on a tragic battle in Karenni state during Myanmar’s Spring Revolution. The People’s Defence Force (PDF) attempt to retrieve a fallen comrade’s body. However, the operation takes a devastating turn when two PDF members lose their legs—one from a landmine and another from a motor accident. Faced with heartbreak, they decide to hold a funeral with an empty coffin.
- Bou Sho
- Director: Kasetsu (JAPAN)
A project to write in calligraphy on the streets and ground using water, the camera gazing as it disappears. Calligraphy as a medium rooted in time. An attempt to represent in one shot how even precious memories fade away. Retaining forgetting in our memory.
- Puay Chai
- Director: Keenen Yong (MALAYSIA)
Puay Chai (培才 meaning to cultivate talent) is a Chinese vernacular school located in Petaling Jaya, one of the most densely populated cities in Klang Valley of Malaysia. The children go about their day while the camera seeks to observe.
- Our Faith / Nuestra Fe
- Director: Kayama Shota (JAPAN)
The Temple of Guadalupe in Mexico was built by conquistadors. But the Virgen de Guadalupe, who is enshrined there, revives memories of that past in the present, as a reincarnation of an ancient god wearing a mask. A one-shot film on the Día de Guadalupe shows the history of the massacre/miscegenation.